Now after the second world war, there was an invention that revolution Western culture. Now you may be thinking 'oh it was the atomic bomb or it was some other thing that's come out of military research this invention.' But this invention wasn't anything that came from military research. This invention wasn't anything that came from a factory. Didn't come from an assembly line. The invention that came after World War II that revolutionized Western culture was the invention of the teenager. In fact the very word 'teenager' wasn't invented until the 1940's believe it or not... and so the fact of the teenage years is ancient, but the function of the teenage years as we know it are a relatively new invention.
What I mean by that is that in the mid-20th century, the teenage years shifted from an intermediary stage of life with the goal of adulthood and...it becomes a distinct social phenomenon that resists movement toward adulthood...
Well one of the results of this was, what we might call, and what has been called, a generation gap. That the youth had a different culture from their parents and for the most part, churches did not deal well with this separation, this generation gap between the adults and the teenagers. And in some sense, the churches were not able to figure out how do we reach teenagers. And in the midst of that, a couple of organizations arose, Young Life, Youth for Christ...Well these rose in the middle of the 20th century in large part to do what churches they felt like weren't doing which is reaching the youth, reaching this new rising youth generation.
So as Young Life and Youth for Christ became more and more popular many churches basically tried to replicate those programs in their congregations. They had a youth group that was similar to, doing the same things as Young Life and Youth for Christ, but doing it more connected to their churches...but then the youth program is barely connected to the rest of the congregation.
Now what happens in that era is that the churches begin to in essence say we're going to have a youth group and we're gonna send the youth out there and to be involved in that and to have fun in that for these years and then maybe when they grow up, when they start growing up when they become mature, they'll come back in to the church. And so the youth group ran in sort of a separate tract from the rest of the congregation. It was a separate reality from them.
And that little spot where the youth group and the church intersect there...there was an individual that was hired to be able to mediate those two worlds...and that individual was supposed to be cool enough to attract young people to the youth group on the outside, but also mature enough to survive a deacons meeting on the inside and of course that person was the youth director or the youth minister. Those begin to be hired in the mid-20th century and increasingly throughout the 20th century and so we have the advent of the modern youth movement.
But there's another change as it moves from Young Life, Youth for Christ parachurch organizations to these church sponsored groups. As it moves from parachurch to church groups, the focus shifted from evangelizing lost youth to retaining and entertaining churched youth.
Now what happens the last half of the 20th century is this generation gap grows until adolescence really becomes it's own culture unto itself and the adolescent years become years that are marked by an expectation of maximum indulgence and maximum freedom coupled with minimum responsibilities and minimum supervision...
What happens during the last part of the 20th century is increasingly people were saying 'Well we've got a youth ministry, we also need a children's ministry separate from the congregation as a whole and a preschool and a senior adult ministry into this ministry and of that ministry...and the church becomes this ring of loosely connected separated programs. It becomes siloed we might say so each person in each ministry is in their own silo that they pursue ministry separately. They pursue discipleship separately from one another and once a week at staff meeting everybody opens their window on their silo so to speak and ask 'is everybody okay in yours? and you have anything on your calendar I need to know about and everything is okay over here' and everybody shuts the doors and goes back to their very separated ministries.
That's church as I knew it in the late 20th century and early 21st century and probably you've seen evidence of that yourself. That's where we're at in terms of our churches...this separation from one another.
Now what has happened at the end of the 20th century and the early 21st century is a movement toward family ministry and part of the impulse behind family ministry is how do we get rid of the silos. How do we bring people back together again?...and what that's intended to indicate is that in this new way of looking at things, a person's central identity and central place of discipleship is not their individualized group but it is the body of Christ as a whole, the intergenerational, multigenerational body of Christ people drawn together...They don't say 'well I serve with the youth group' rather 'I serve Christ in the context of this church and the particular context where I'm at right now is the youth ministry, but I'm serving Christ in the context of my church as a whole...
The reason we gather together into individual programs or small programs is not for the sake of making things fun for me, making things interesting for me, making sure that I have people that are like me around me. That's not the purpose for that. The purpose we have individual age organized ministries or interest organized ministries is for the sake of reaching the world around us. So what we would communicate to the youth in this is that the reason we're drawing you together in a youth group isn't so you can just have these best years of your life. It's rather so that you can be on mission to reach youth and to reach people that the rest of us may not be able to reach.
That's the vision of coordination that I have for the future of the organization of the church. That's much of what we're trying to do in family ministry is to aim churches toward that so that they see that it's not just a conglomeration of programs, rather we need one another and the reason we have the programs is for the sake of mission to the world, not simply for the sake of our own interests or benefit
